In an interview on Love and Greats

Let’s talk about Sappho, another great female character. She lived about 100 years after Homer, didn’t she?

The general consensus is that she was born in the second half of the seventh century BC. We know almost nothing about her life. The only hard evidence is in the poems themselves. In classical antiquity and later she was massively valued as a poet. In the Great Library in Alexandria there were nine volumes of her poems. We now have 200 tiny fragments and only two complete poems. So it’s a minuscule proportion of what she produced.

Tell me about her poetry.

Well, she was admired in antiquity for the delicacy and elegance of her verse, and this is quite right – it’s just pitch-perfect. She talks about love as being bittersweet – such a cliché but she was almost certainly the first person to coin this expression that everyone can understand.

Are they all love poems?

Some of them are wedding hymns, so they do have a heterosexual context, some are the most extraordinary personal poems of desire for women. There’s a wonderful poem that Catullus translated into Latin...she’s describing the experience of sitting in one part of a room and in another part of the room the woman that she desires is talking to a man. It’s a vivid description not only of jealousy, of being a voyeur, but of the pathology of being in love. She talks of a ‘flame running under her skin’ and she turns the ‘colour of pale grass’. She’s probably one of the very first poets of the personal.

What about the translation?

Stanley Lombardo is a wonderful Kansas-based poet and professor of classics and he takes the modernist view that the fragments are what they are – he doesn’t pretend they’re anything other than scraps and bits – and so they look very broken up and fragile on the page. Some of the fragments are incredibly short. Fragment 16 in Lombardo’s translation is just: I long and yearn. And number 46 is: A child, very soft, picking flowers.

The reason they are like this is that for a very long time the Sappho we knew was the Sappho quoted by later writers. Quite often they’d quote just a couple of lines to give an example of a particular spelling or a metrical trope. Then in the late 19th century archaeologists in Oxyrhynchus in Egypt started finding papyrus with little bits of Sappho written on it. One poem found in the 1930s was written on a pot shard – it could be attributed to Sappho confidently because one of its lines had been quoted by another author.